Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Renegades Want Old-time Religion Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 11:17:55 EST Message-ID: \HD Renegades Want Old-time Religion \BY Gayle Hanson \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: An ecclesiastical divide has formed within the Episcopal Church as conservative clergy and congregations try to hold on to the old ways even as the church moves forward in its liberalism. Congregations are trying to break from the national church to join newly formed, traditionalist dioceses. Legal battles have ensued. TEXT: It is a brisk Sunday morning in October and inside the Episcopal church of Trinity-St. Michael's sunlight streams through the stained glass windows and throws multicolored shadows across the plain, whitewashed walls. The heavy perfume of incense wafts through the air as the choir and congregation rise to sing God's praises. After the service, the Rev. Rocco Florenza, rector of the Fairfield, Conn., church, wends his way from pew to pew hugging well-wishers who have gathered to welcome him back after a long, debilitating illness. In his sermon he spoke about the battle for his health, but now, after sharing coffee and conversation in the parish hall, he wishes to tell another story, of the battle for his church. Trinity-St. Michael's observes the same rite that has been handed down within the Anglican tradition for centuries, but it does so without recognition by the Anglican Communion, which includes the national Episcopal Church , and therein lies the tale. Unwilling to accept the ordination of women and faithful to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the congregation of Trinity-St. Michael's broke from the mainline Episcopal national conference in 1986 to join the Province (formerly Diocese) of Christ the King, a confederation of so-called ongoing Episcopal churches that formed in late 1979 in response to what its members believe is the erosion of the traditional tenets upon which their faith is built. The split has not been about belief alone. In September 1986 the Diocese of Hartford filed a lawsuit against Trinity-St. Michael's over ownership of the church building. The diocese won Round 1 a year ago , but the church has appealed the ruling, and November marks its second chance in court . At stake are the church itself and a nearly $1 million endowment. "This is hell against heaven," says Florenza. "I can't put it any other way. We are David fighting Goliath here. But we cannot condone what has happened in the church. We must fight for our beliefs. This is perhaps the most important battle going on in Christendom today." The Connecticut churchyard is not the only ground on which the battle is being waged. Across the country dozens of Episcopal parishes are questioning their relationship with the national church, and newly formed traditional parishes have sprung up that instead of pledging their allegiance to the national church have aligned themselves with the traditionalists. The congregations are viewed as schismatic by outsiders, but members see themselves as the true defenders of their faith. Other traditionalist Episcopalians have stayed within the national conference, while pushing hard for a so-called church within a church - a place where they can hold fast to their beliefs in the face of what they see as an overwhelming tide of liberalism that has ushered in the ordination of women, increasing acceptance of homosexuality and disregard for the basic tenets of the faith. The Episcopal Synod of America , an organization of conservative clergy and congregations that have remained in the Episcopal Church, has formed the Missionary Diocese of the Americas , a nongeographic province that provides a spiritual and organizational home for its members. The national church does not recognize the Missionary Diocese, and a legal battle is brewing in Richmond that may force the issue. At St. Luke's , one of the oldest churches in the area, the Rev. Leo Combes's parishioners requested permission from Bishop Frank Vest of the Diocese of Southern Virginia to leave the diocese and join the Missionary Diocese. The bishop refused. St. Luke's proceeded anyway. Now the courts must decide whether the church and its endowment are the property of the diocese or of the parish, which holds title to the church and was formed before the founding of the diocese in 1785 . Jeffrey Penn , a spokesman for the Episcopal Church, says, "I can't predict where it will end up. There is a commitment in the polity to continue the church there, and our view is that dissidents have taken it over. To some extent as we watch the situation unfold there it may oddly enough decide what the Missionary Diocese is. If this parish is able to separate itself out and align with the Missionary Diocese it may legitimize it." St. Luke's has filed a court petition arguing that a Civil War era statute in Virginia allows a parish to join a new jurisdiction when the denomination has undergone formal ecclesiastical "division." The statute was applied to Methodist congregations when they split over slavery. The situation has been particularly painful for Combes, who, like his congregation, is traditionalist. He has been disciplined, and he claims that the bishop has threatened to depose him, which would strip him of priesthood. "Basically the congregation requested to move to the Missionary Diocese of the Americas in order that it could have a bishop who was more traditional in his belief," Combes says. "Frankly, I don't understand why that shouldn't be possible. If there is a place within the Episcopal Church where traditionalists can stay and pray with the prayer book they wish to use and remain true to the traditional theology they believe in, then the congregation will not leave the church. But in this case the bishop has said, 'Do it my way or no way.' " But Bishop Vest says he tried to work with the congregation. "I knew St. Luke's was conservative," he says. "And I knew they were unhappy with me because I publicly supported the ordination of Barbara Harris," the Episcopal Church's only woman bishop, "and had been one of the bishops that laid hands on her head when she was consecrated. But I had always worked to try and make them comfortable in the diocese. When they asked that I appoint more traditional clergy to diocesan work I was more than happy to do so, but when I asked the clergy to fill out what committees they were willing to work on, Father Combes never responded." Vest says the congregation sought blanket permission to have clergy from the Episcopal Synod of America visit whenever members wished. He says he could not honor that request but that he did agree to let the head of the Missionary Diocese of the Americas visit. Vest says, "The next thing that happened was St. Luke's requested permission to leave my Episcopal oversight to join the MDA. But the MDA has no jurisdiction, so it was kind of like them saying they would be Presbyterian. "As for Father Combes, I had to inhibit him for having abandoned the communion of his church, and I did that on the recommendation of the standing committee of the diocese." The bishop adds, "I have not threatened to depose him. I am not at all certain what I will do." As many of the nation's estimated 2.5 million Episcopalians wrestle with their place in the church and with the institution's future, the Church of England is preparing for a mid-November vote on whether women should be allowed to join the priesthood. Should the ordination of women be approved, some believe it will spell the end of nearly 500 years of Anglicanism. I believe that if the ordination of women goes through, the majority of orthodox Anglicans will go to Rome," says Bishop Robert Morse, who heads the traditionalist Province of Christ the King. "A lot of priests would rather die with their faith intact than adopt heresy." Penn has a different view: "Obviously there are people in the Church of England who don't believe women should be allowed into the priesthood, and there is some talk of bolting if it happens. But so far in the Anglican Communion there has been a resolve that despite the differences there is a shared liturgy, a shared history and a common affection that has held the church together. One of the things that the leadership of this church has said is that the church is a laboratory for testing how we can live with the tension of disagreement and still be in the same family. Of course, the exception was in the 1970s." The engines of the national Episcopal Church hummed smoothly for nearly 200 years after its founding in 1789 , but a major wrench was thrown into the machinery in the 1960s. In discussions of the current crisis with numerous Episcopal clergy and laymen of both persuasions, conservative and liberal, one name surfaced again and again - that of the late James Pike, who was bishop of California. Called a heretic by some, a freethinker by others, Pike, with his controversial 1964 book, A Time for Christian Candor, set off an uproar in the Episcopal Church that continues to this day. He questioned the doctrines of the virgin birth, the Incarnation and the Trinity, three fundamental articles of Episcopal faith. While some bishops pressed for his trial on the grounds of heresy, in the end, despite Pike's own wish for a formal ecclesiastical trial, the Episcopal bishops merely censured him. In his 1988 book, The Episcopal Church in Crisis, eminent Anglican historian John Booty looks back on that time: "The Pike affair aroused people as it did in part because of the unsettled conditions of church in society in the 1960s, because of the visibility of the radical theologians in the media, and because of the furor raising serious questions concerning the church in general and the Episcopal Church in particular." If the unwillingness of the bishops to condemn Pike chilled the hearts of traditionalists during the tumultuous days of the 1960s, by the mid-1970s things had reached crisis proportions. In 1974, without the approval of the church at large, a bishop ordained 11 women in Philadelphia. Two years later, the ruling body of the church, the General Convention, voted to accept their ordination. As far as the traditionalists were concerned, a crack had appeared in the foundation of their church. And it would widen with the replacement of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer by a new prayer book in 1979. Part of the trauma this caused was aesthetic - some believed the new prayer book robbed the liturgy of any semblance of poetry . To others, it spelled more drastic changes. "What they did was subtly alter the theology," says David Rawson, chancellor of the Southeastern Convocation of the Episcopal Synod of America . "In a lot of the prayers they very neatly excised the concept of sin and redemption. And if you don't have the notion of sin and Christ as the Redeemer, what have you got?" The new book's introduction was the final blow for some traditionalists. A number of clergy left the national church and formed the Episcopal Church of America ; others joined the Anglican Church in America. And some, under the leadership of Bishop Albert Chambers, left to form what is now the Province of Christ the King. Morse was among those who joined Chambers. He is consecrating Washington's Episcopal Heritage Church as the province's national headquarters . With more than 50 churches nationwide, the St. Joseph of Arimathea Anglican Theological College in Berkeley, Calif., and more than 50,000 adherents to its traditionalist beliefs, Christ the King is the largest of the ongoing groups that broke from the national church. These renegade Episcopalians ardently defend themselves against the charge of schism. "I think there is a great distortion surrounding the concept of the continuing church," says Morse. "We are not a bunch of tired old Episcopalians who are resistant to change. We are upholding the theology of the church. We were forced out of the church because we would not cave in to pressure. But we have won our churches in Georgia, Kentucky and California. Most of us were disenfranchised from our churches, so we have had to start all over again from scratch. In a short time we have built more than 30 parishes from nothing and we are building them all over the U.S. right now." The traditionalists see the ordination of women not as a political or social issue but as a removal of one of their theology's linchpins. "What people don't understand about the whole concept of the ordination of women is that it was never a question of equality but of theology," says Morse. "The notion has always been of Jesus as the bridegroom and of the church as his bride. You simply cannot have Jesus as the bride." In other words, to violate the maleness of the priesthood is to violate the notion of God as the Father. In his 1988 book , What Will Happen to God? Feminism and the Reconstruction of Christian Belief, the Rev. William Oddie , priest librarian of Pusey House, the theology faculty library at Oxford, examines women's role in the Anglican Communion and the problems inherent in their ordination. He writes, "Women's ordination, as we have repeatedly seen, is thought of by many of those most committed to achieving it as a means of installing immovably, in the permanent structures of the Church itself, a fundamental shift in the Christian tradition: to ordain women as priests will be to change at its foundations our idea of God." Bishop Vest says the argument that only a man can represent Jesus is flawed. "It is the humanity of Jesus that we celebrate, not that he was male. The most valid argument against ordaining women was the argument that it was against tradition; that we hadn't done it before," he says. "One bishop I know finally came around to it this way: What he said was that it took the church 30 years to realize that gentiles could be Christians, it took 1,830 years for the church to realize that slavery was wrong, and it took the church 2,000 years to realize that the ordination of women was the will of God." It is not the will of the Province of Christ the King. From Episcopal Heritage Church, rector Paul Hewett illuminates the role the dissidents hope to carve for themselves. "This church has been fully bought and paid for, so it can now be consecrated," Hewett says with pride. "We want Washington as our national headquarters and we want to build a circle of parishes around Washington. We don't want to be just a ragtag collection of parishes, and we don't want to allow ourselves to become marginalized. We want to establish a dynamic rapport with other Anglicans in surrounding communities who are still inside the church. We've already won a couple of dozen churches up and down the coast." Hewett is keeping a close eye on the Church of England's vote on the ordination of women. He is also watching the struggle of traditional parishes that have stayed in the Episcopal Church to hold firm to their beliefs. Like others who have moved outside the boundaries of the national church, he questions whether those parishes that wish to maintain their traditionalist beliefs will ever truly be able to reconcile themselves to what he sees as the continuing liberalization of Episcopal theology. "I believe that if the Church of England votes to ordain women, the entire church will lapse into schism," says Hewett. "If England falls, the whole Anglican community will unravel. One of our beliefs is that the most important thing we're doing is putting as much of the Anglican community as we can back on track." Since the first women were ordained as Episcopal priests , more than 1,000 others have joined them, and Washington, D.C., soon will be the jurisdiction of the national church's second woman bishop. How that will affect the area's more traditional Episcopal congregations is yet to be seen. For Hewett, though, the writing is clearly on the wall. "What we can do is give traditional churches a positive vision for how they can set things up," says Hewett. "You just write a letter to your bishop and you say, 'Because you've abandoned the faith, we are now petitioning that we be under the jurisdiction of another bishop.' You put a 29-cent stamp on the letter and you mail it and you politely tell him that he can't come in your church. A lot of people overcomplicate the issue. But really what you are doing is very patriotic. All it takes is faith." 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